Website Building Guides & Tutorials

Everything you wanted to know about building an eCommerce website and a lot you didn't! Here you'll find an expert analysis for why you should choose Shopify over Magento or why Lemonstand makes a better platform for new startups that are going places.

Bandwidth overage charges are a bad thing, and I advise you to steer clear of any platform that imposes limits on the amount of traffic you can receive to your website or the number of images you can store. Hosting is such a cheap commodity these days that there is absolutely no reason for it apart from nickel and diming you.

Your biggest asset is time. You may have plenty of meetings to go to or clients to see, but you'll always be short of time. Even if you have time on your hands, it shouldn't be spent building a website. There are many more important tasks to get done like building out your Customer Relations Database (CRM) and reaching out to potential new clients. The other asset you're probably short of is money. So spending a lot of it building your first small business website isn't going to be the best use of...

Shopify and BigCommerce are the two most well-developed cloud-based eCommerce website builder solutions. How do you decide which one to choose and what makes one better than the other? In this guide, I point out the key differences between both platforms so that you can choose the best fit for your business. Once again I'll reiterate that there is no “best eCommerce solution”, only what will work best for your business type. First of all, if you haven't already, read my Shopify v Magento website builder guide to understand why building an eCommerce...

Why You Should Choose Shopify Over Open Source eCommerce Solutions
If you are an SME (Small, Medium Enterprises), then you should be looking at a cloud-based solution for your eCommerce project.
Why? Because you can get started quickly, with the minimum of fuss and keep the costs of development to a minimum.
Shopify, BigCommerce or Lemonstand are all great eCommerce website builders. I've used Shopify as my headline maker because it is the most popular and widely used eCommerce cloud-based solution.

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As a teenager, I applied to join the army only to discover I was colour blind.
Nothing dramatic. I found it difficult to distinguish between darker shades of colour. For example, dark grey can often appear to be black and deep blues can appear purple. Web-safe colours are a bonus for me because I know I'm not looking at a made up shade and all the colours are the same on whichever device I'm viewing.

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Hiring a professional graphic designer go to work on your logo and website design is the best way to end up with a great looking site, but it also costs money, and the best graphic designers are not cheap. When you start blogging to build traffic to your eCommerce store, then you'll want to add plenty of imagery to your posts to break up the text and make it more comfortable for web viewing. But if you've ever tried searching for “free stock photography” then you'll know that separating the wheat from the...

You've made the decision to build an eCommerce website but what percentage of your profits are transaction charges going to eat up? Finding the best payment gateways for your eCommerce solution can save you a big percentage of your profits. To show you what you are likely to be paying in transaction fees I've put together several different scenarios to give you a ballpark approximation of running costs. If you haven't considered the impact of eCommerce transaction charges then this could be a real eye opener for you! ...

A well-designed logo sets the tone for your business so making a logo in five minutes and calling it done is a rookie mistake. A logo lives with your business long into the future assuming your company makes it that far and redoing it can get expensive and messy. Not only will you have to recreate your logo for the web but also all your offline media as well. It's much better to spend a bit of time right from the beginning and get it right (or as close to right as you...

Building an eCommerce site is a fantastic way to start your own business. You can start by making it alongside a regular day job or take the plunge and start full time if you have the funds to support yourself. Using one of the new breeds of eCommerce website builders will give you low start-up costs and extreme flexibility. If the latter you'll need to budget for 12 months before you begin to factor in any income because unless you get lucky, that's the amount of time it takes to gain traction with search engines. ...

If the idea of sitting on a beach in the sun sipping a Pina Colada while your eCommerce website rakes in cash appeals to you, then you are not alone. Thousands of new eCommerce website projects are started every day, but only a select few succeed and go on to make their owners money. Most die an early death through poor product choice, insufficient promotional activity or simply lack of awareness at the massive amount of hard work required to build a profitable eCommerce business. Getting off to the best...

When your Web Developer tells you that you need an SSL certificate to make your eCommerce website fully operational, your eyes will probably glaze over, and you'll wonder when the spending money bit stops and the making money begins.
The SSL Certificate is the final piece in the eCommerce jigsaw.
Without it, you can't trade. Using SSL is not compulsory, but if you choose not to use it, the consequences are similar to driving a car without insurance.